Many, if not most, high-ranking Republicans think Donald Trump is unfit to be president.
Many, if not most, high-ranking Democrats have concluded President Biden is incapable of winning reelection or performing the duties of the presidency through 2028.
The difference is, Democrats just did something about it.
The Democratic Party started applying pressure on Biden to step aside within minutes of him leaving the debate stage, where he laid bare the full extent of his apparent age-related decline. Biden on June 27 demonstrated, at the very least, he was ill-suited to the most basic rigors of a presidential campaign.
Democrats gently, and then more firmly, made it untenable for Biden to ignore the reality everyone else saw.
Nonetheless, Biden’s exit Sunday was not a foregone conclusion. Biden made clear he wanted to stay in the race. Democrats forced him out.
Briggs: I don’t want to age like Joe Biden
That is how functional organizations work. When someone at the top makes selfish, detrimental choices, other leaders rise to prevent that person from dragging the entire organization down a path of self-destruction.
Republicans have spent the better part of eight years teetering at a similar precipice, from “Access Hollywood” to Jan. 6, 2021, and repeatedly making the opposite choice.
That’s why it’s risible for Republicans like U.S. Rep. Jim Banks to imply Democrats are up to something nefarious now.
“The party of ‘democracy’ is invalidating the vote of millions of Americans! Very shameful,” Banks wrote Sunday.
Banks in his quieter moments likely knows a thing or two about shame. He is someone who viewed, and perhaps still views, Trump as unbefitting of the presidency. Banks publicly expressed displeasure over Trump, as did many other Republicans, including the newly minted vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance.
In the end, Democrats acted responsibly
Republicans in 2016 contemplated taking drastic action to remove Trump from the party’s nomination after the “Access Hollywood” video surfaced showing Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women. Eventually, then-vice presidential nominee Mike Pence excused Trump’s words as “locker room talk” and Republicans made peace with their consciences.
Banks did, too. But he continued to express misgivings that seemed to come from a true place of personal integrity.
“Trump is extremely flawed,” Banks told National Review in 2016. “I’m sad that we’ve set the bar as low as we have when so much is at stake.”
Banks later wrestled with how to be an independent-minded Republican in Congress during the Trump era before suppressing that pesky integrity.
The bar remains exactly where Banks said it was in 2016, if not lower. Trump, in addition to his own bouts of rambling, nonsensical speech, is 78 years old with a long record of sexual misconduct, tax avoidance and fraud and, of course, an attempt to overturn an election.
Biden’s defiance has been painful to watch. But, ultimately, the president accepted the truth that his campaign was unsustainable. He deserves credit for that.
Meanwhile, Trump has not yet admitted he lost the 2020 election.
Republicans have had opportunities to break Trump’s reality distortion field, yet have repeatedly opted to let the former president operate in his parallel universe.
Another Indiana congressman, Rep. Rudy Yakym, said Sunday that “no one helped orchestrate the conspiracy to hide Joe Biden’s cognitive decline from the public more than Kamala Harris,” who presumably will take Biden’s place atop the presidential ticket.
I’m skeptical of the conspiracy storyline, in large part because it was the Biden campaign’s idea to debate Trump in June — a tactic the campaign apparently thought would put to rest concerns about the president’s age. That obviously didn’t work.
It seems likely that at least some people close to Biden sought to shield the extent of the president’s struggles from the public. What matters more, though, is that as soon as Biden’s decline became obvious, Democrats waged an insurmountable campaign to push the president aside.
Now, the Biden problem is resolved and Democrats are moving on. See how that can work?
One of America’s two major political parties just showed it is capable of acting responsibly. The other is heading into November with the oldest presidential candidate in U.S. history.
Contact James Briggs at 317-444-4732 or james.briggs@indystar.com. Follow him on X and Threads at @JamesEBriggs.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Democrats did to Biden what Jim Banks won’t do to Trump